Please give a page reference, I have a copy of his book handy, and I'd like to see that
It's in footnote 103, that refers to Michael Williams' work on deforestation. Lomborg quotes 7.5%, Williams' figure is 7,449 square km. See footnote 3 in this reference.
Scientific American slams the book because it doesn't want to upset it's left leaning advertisers/readers
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH AHAHAHA Scientific American, perhaps the most reputable general science publication on the planet (sorry "Nature"), has left leaning readers. Thats really funny.
but because they indisputably might be damaging the environment.
Quite right OxideBoy. It should be added that reputable climate change research has a marked tendency to be extremely circumspect in its conclusions. Papers usually take the form: If assumption A, assumption B and assumption C then we believe something really bad will happen.
Unfortunately, the media have a tendency to report this story as:
Back to the "scientists and "environmentalists" who make their money by predicting doomsday.
Thats an interesting " before "scientist". I wonder where it was supposed to be closed.
Guess what happens if global warming was disproven?
We'd be very pleased. We'd know the world wasn't endangered and we could go and do other, equally challenging, equally well paid, research into short and medium range weather forecasting.
you put Linux on there, you can't just click "Uninstall" and have it go away.
Actually, thats a good idea. An unistall command that says "Insert Install CD", then runs LILO to cause the machine to boot an image of the CD that deletes the Linux partition and recreates/resizes the FAT/VFAT partition as it was, and reruns LILO to boot Windows again. Nifty.
It is probably quite understandable that environmental scientists would take great umbrage at both Lomborg's cheek and his conclusions
Scientist don't take umbrage at his cheek or (directly) his conclusions. They take umbrage at his science. Basically, he isn't very good at it. His research is full of errors, (sometimes very basic ones. At one point he quotes an absolute figure as a percentage because he is unfamiliar with the different conventions for decimal places between the US and Europe). He selectively quotes (and misquotes) source material to support his claims. Frankly, he's a self publicist, and if his pseudoscience reduces the amount of research into the very real possibility of irreversible, catastrophic, climate change, a very dangerous one.
As an aside, lets just apply Occam's Razor. Here are the two possible alternatives:
Lomborg is wrong
There is a massive (indeed, worldwide) conspiracy of scientists, suppressing their real knowledge, intent only on scare mongering to preserve their funding
(Full Disclosure: I am a Geophysical Fluid Dynamicist, so I could be part of the conspiracy [TINC] myself)
If you think nobody will pay, then why do you care?
Because when a site you enjoy, with known financial problems and presently funded largely by a descredited IPO announces their plans for an unresearched and almost certainly unworkable new revenue stream, it means the end is usually near. And that would be a shame.
Perfectly preserved because powerful currents from a giant flood of biblical proportions dumped a pile of sediment on them before they could lose their shape.
Thats right. The impact of powerful currents caused them not to be disturbed. Thats exactly what powerful currents do, leave everything completely unruffled.
the Microsoft.de guy is obviously much closer to the situation than I am and clearly feels that his response is the correct one. Certainly he's more qualified to judge this than me. Time will tell.
And No. 1 on our top ten of "Paragraphs you never thought you'd read on slashdot" goes to... Ami Ganguli
This is slightly off topic, I admit, but I have a problem with the GPL as applied to libraries. Here we go:
According to RMS, if I write code that links with a GPL'd library (say, readline), my code must be GPL'd
Now suppose I write, in a clean room, an exact duplicate replacement for readline (say, greedline) from reverse engineering.
I offer to license to UNIX vendors for $10,000,000
Now I can write non-GPL code with readline hooks and distribute it
Now, the FSF may argue that it would be illegal for third parties to link my non-GPL code with readline, but this doesn't sound very feasible, and it isn't what is stated in the license.
(Another thing: Now suppose I merely claimed to have written greedline. It'd cost you $10,000,000 to call my bluff)
My coworkers are big soccer (football) fans, and they use the Tivo to create their own instant replays, because unlike football, the networks don't really replay much for you
Not really the fault of the networks, soccer just doesn't have many of those stop-the-clock-while-everyone-stands-around-doing- fuck-all breaks that US Football does.
Although the statistics so far only go up to August 2001, aggregated distributions of the Linux operating system suffered 96 vulnerabilities while Windows NT/2000 suffered only 42.
Breaking the figures down by distribution, Mandrake Linux 7.2 notched up 33 vulnerabilities, Red Hat 7.0 suffered 28, Mandrake 7.1 had 27 and Debian 2.2 had 26.
drugs make people do things that they normally wouldn't do
Such as "laugh at Jim Carrey movies". But seriously folks...
Fact: 85% of all violent crimes in the US are committed because of, or under the direct influence of drugs.
I don't know if thats true or not, but I am not taking your word for it. Source please. While you're looking for that, heres a rather better researched bit of evidence
Amen. Given the forum, its worth pointing out that the also produced the best (bar none) version of The Lord Of The Rings in existence. Its currently being rebroadcast 14:30-15:30 GMT on Saturdays, and appearing in the alt.binaries.* hierarchy near you.
Slashdot Mirror
Scientific American, perhaps the most reputable general science publication on the planet (sorry "Nature"), has left leaning readers. Thats really funny.
Unfortunately, the media have a tendency to report this story as:
SOMETHING REALLY BAD WILL HAPPEN : Say Boffins
We'd be very pleased. We'd know the world wasn't endangered and we could go and do other, equally challenging, equally well paid, research into short and medium range weather forecasting.
As an aside, lets just apply Occam's Razor. Here are the two possible alternatives:
(Full Disclosure: I am a Geophysical Fluid Dynamicist, so I could be part of the conspiracy [TINC] myself)
"Wed Sep 3095 14:56:00 GMT 1993", to be exact.
Because thats where everyone in the world will be looking right now. Add slashdot, to that ... eeek.
Not a wholly informative hyperlink that. See the full list, here
Doh! That link should've been to the GPL, not the LGPL. (readline is GPL'd)
Now, the FSF may argue that it would be illegal for third parties to link my non-GPL code with readline, but this doesn't sound very feasible, and it isn't what is stated in the license.
(Another thing: Now suppose I merely claimed to have written greedline. It'd cost you $10,000,000 to call my bluff)
So I suppose that now means that 42 33.
Contrary to what many believe, someones views being "socialist" does not automatically invalidate them
I don't know if thats true or not, but I am not taking your word for it. Source please. While you're looking for that, heres a rather better researched bit of evidence
A prediction, pulled from my ass: Here's what I think will happen.
i) A respected developer (Alan Cox, perhaps) who already has their own patch tree will open it up via some source management system
ii) Other developers, including those frustrated ones, will begin to use it, including keeping it roughly in sync with the official tree.
iii) The forked tree will develop as fast/faster than Linus' tree (assuming the pro-CVS people are right)
iv) LT will realise that its not a bad idea, and essentially adopt the forked tree as his own, complete with CVS.
In short, theoretical arguments for CVS will continue to cut little slack with LT. A demonstration of its effacacy will be very persuasive.
If (iii) is untrue, the argument will be moot anyway (why have source control if it doesn't help?)
Or alternatively, multiply by 40 and thats the level of IQ its typical output is aimed at. (This doesn't really work for Five Live, either).
Thanks,
Gareth